The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

But such accounts did not emerge from nowhere. The experience of all wars is that armies, unless under very tight discipline, commit atrocities—and no one would suggest that the Germanic armies were under strict control.

The scale of the literary response to these difficult questions, the tragic realities that lay behind it, and the ingenious nature of some of the answers that were produced, are all worth examining in detail. They show very clearly that the fifth century was a time of real crisis, rather than one of accommodation and peaceful adjustment.31

Here he successfully sidestepped the entire problem of the failure of the Christian empire by arguing that all human affairs are flawed, and that a true Christian is really a citizen of Heaven. Abandoning centuries of Roman pride in their divinely ordained state (including Christian pride during the fourth century), Augustine argued that, in the grand perspective of Eternity, a minor event like the sack of Rome paled into insignificance.

It has rightly been observed that the deposition in 476 of the last emperor resident in Italy, Romulus Augustulus, caused remarkably little stir: the great historian of Antiquity, Momigliano, called it the ‘noiseless fall of an empire’.39 But the principal reason why this event passed almost unnoticed was because contemporaries knew that the western empire, and with it autonomous Roman power, had already disappeared in all but name. Jerome, in writing the empire’s epitaph in 410, was decidedly premature; but it is hard to dispute the gloomy picture from the 440s and 450s of Salvian and of the Chronicler. These men were well aware of the disasters that had engulfed the West; and they would have been astonished by the modern mirage of an accommodating and peaceful fifth century.

Für den Niedergang des Römerreiches sind bisher die folgenden 210 im Register nachgewiesenen Faktoren herangezogen worden: Aberglaube, Absolutismus, Ackersklaverei, Agrarfrage, Akedia, Anarchie, Antigermanismus, Apathie, Arbeitskräftemangel, Arbeitsteilung, Aristokratie, Askese, Ausbeutung, negative Auslese, Ausrottung der Besten, Autoritätsverlust, Badewesen, Bankrott, Barbarisierung, Vernichtung des Bauernstandes, Berufsarmee, Berufsbindung, Besitzunterschiede, Bevölkerungsdruck, Bleivergiftung, Blutvergiftung, Blutzersetzung, Bodenerosion, Bodenerschöpfung, Versiegen der Bodenschätze, Bodensperre, Bolschewisation, Bürgerkrieg, Bürgerrechtsverleihung, Bürokratie, Byzantinismus, capillarité sociale, Charakterlosigkeit, Christentum, Convenienzheiraten, Degeneration des Intellekts, Demoralisierung, Despotismus, Dezentralisation, Disziplinlosigkeit des Heeres, Duckmäuserei, soziale Egalisierung, Egoismus, Energieschwund, Entartung, Entgötterung, Entnervung, Entnordung, Entpolitisierung, Entrechtung, Entromanisierung, Entvolkerung, Entvolkung, Entwaldung, Erdbeben, Erstarrung, unzureichendes Erziehungswesen, Etatismus, Expansion, Faulheit, Feinschmeckerei, Feudalisierung, Fiskalismus, Frauenemanzipation, Freiheit im Übermaß, Freilassungen von Sklaven, Friedensromantik, Frühreife, Führungsschwäche, Geldgier, Geldknappheit, Geldwirtschaft, Genußsucht, Germanenangriffe, Gicht, Gladiatorenwesen, Glaubenskämpfe, Gleichberechtigung, Goldabfluß, Gräzisierung, Großgrundbesitz, Halbbi...

It is always more convincing in German.